There is a strong demand to reduce the size of electronic systems. The size reduction is especially desirable in mobile devices where area and volume are a premium. But it is also desirable in servers that are placed in big data centers because it is important to squeeze in as many servers as possible in a fixed real estate.
One of the largest components found in many electronic systems is a voltage regulator (also referred to as a power regulator). A power regulator often includes a large number of bulky off-chip components to deliver voltages to integrated chips, including, for example, processors, memory devices (e.g., a dynamic read access memory (DRAM)), radio-frequency (RF) chips, WiFi combo chips, and power amplifiers. Because many electronic systems include many power regulators, it is desirable to reduce the size of power regulators, thus reducing the overall size of electronic systems.
A power regulator can include one or more semiconductor chips that provide power (e.g., voltage and current), derived from a power source (e.g., a battery), to an output load. The one or more semiconductor chips can include a DC-DC regulator chip, and the output load can include a variety of integrated chips (e.g., an application processor, a DRAM, flash memory).
Oftentimes, the power regulator is tailored to a particular type of output load. For example, if the output load is known to consume about 1 W of power, the power regulator for the output load is tailored to deliver 1 W at the expense of degraded performance for other output power regimes.
There have been efforts to implement an integrated voltage regulator (IVR) that integrates all components of a power regulator (e.g., power switches, capacitors, inductors, controller circuits) in a single die or a single package. The challenges faced by the design engineers are that different applications demand different performance specifications (e.g., output current, input voltage, output voltage) of power regulators, and it is costly and time-consuming to design separate IVRs for different specifications.